Imagine this. You're walking about town. You decide to be an efficient pedestrian and cross the street without permission from some jerk traffic light. Your renegade act gets caught on AI-powered CCTV that recognizes your face. A message pops up on your phone containing a fine.

In Shenzen, a city with a population of over 12 million, a company called Intellifusion has worked with local police to set up AI-powered boards by intersections. If you jaywalk, your face will appear on the board -- alongside your family name. Now, Intellifusion is looking to work with mobile carriers and messaging platforms like WeChat, China's version of WhatsApp, to notify jaywalkers of their transgression on their phones.

"Jaywalking has always been an issue in China," Wang Jun, Intellifusion's director of marketing solutions, told SCMP. "A combination of technology and psychology … can greatly reduce instances of jaywalking and will prevent repeat offences."

"On the one hand, anybody who has witnessed the chaos of Chinese traffic can have a degree of sympathy with the authorities' attempts to make the roads safer," said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International. "But on the other hand, there are obvious practical concerns about the possibility of misidentification of faces. But beyond that, there's the more fundamental worry of how the Chinese state will deploy AI technology in its criminal justice system, which routinely and systematically violates human rights".

Over a period of 10 months, ending in February this year, the AI board in Shenzen displayed 13,930 faces of jaywalkers, reports SCMP. The publication added that only 10 percent of the city's population can be identified by Intellifusion's AI system, but this number will rise dramatically once different provincial governments merge there databases.